This arrived in the mail the other day:It's the new book 60 Quick Knits. As I'm a fan of workhorse yarns like Cascade 220, I love books like this. Of course, I have an extra reason to be a fan of this publication. Turn to page 100 (a nice round number,) and you'll understand.Those are my mittens and pattern in print, in an actual book. They're the Cables and Stripes Mittens and you can queue them up on Ravelry here.They're ideal for using up wee bits of 220 that you may have hanging around.

As if this wasn't already fancy enough (and for me, it really is,) another surprise revealed itself when I flipped the book over:My mitts made the back cover. Nice!

I spent the first part of this week in Chicago, which is rapidly rising to the top of my list of Favourite Cities. Whenever I'm there, everything just feels "right," especially when I'm riding the "L."

Of course, when one's accomodations are exquisite and severalfabulousmeals are consumed, it's difficult to find fault with anything. I managed to return with an even stronger love of amber glass globes and buttercream-coloured Fiestaware in addition to another few salient (and knitting-related) items.

No trip to downtown Chicago is complete (for me,) without a stop at Loopy Yarns. How can one not love a yarn store housed in an old train station?I want to marry their entire wall of Cascade 220 which, to me, is heaven. They carry every colourway. I limited myself to six choice skeins:They seem like quite a springy group, don't they? These are (probably) destined to be a felted bag that I'm currently designing.

I had the pleasure of riding the "L" over to Andersonville where I visited the Swedish American Museum's store. They had yarn on hand, as I had hoped they would. I departed, richer by four skeins of Sisu:...and a charming Dala horse bag, which turned out to be perfect for carrying yarn (which is always a good thing.) It really was a wonderful trip. Now I'm experiencing a sort of state of city-withdrawal. I hope to make it back to Chicago sometime in the summer.

This past Saturday The Yarn Harlot gave a talk at the (beautiful) Main Branch of the Detroit Public Library. I was invited to attend as a local designer/vendor, something that I had never done before. I had no idea what to expect, but I kind of figured that there would be other knitters present.

And there were -- lots and lots of knitters. More knitters than I've seen in once place before. I had my table set up (more like piled) with my samples and a selection of my patterns and for the entire 120-odd minutes of the sale I was swamped (in the best way possible) with knitters. I met so many lovely Detroit knitters I could hardly keep track. I was asked to autograph a copy of my Polska mittens. People wanted to see what socks I was wearing (Little Pumpkins by Sabine Ruppert.) Knitters came up to me and happily informed me that they read my blog and have favourited my patterns on Ravelry. I was slightly light-headed from missing lunch and running on near-pure adrenaline...and then there was this lady in front of me, telling me I needed to hold her sock so she could take my picture. It was, for me, an amazing moment.

It was, of course, due to all these exciting moments that I was too busy in the course of the afternoon to snap many (any?) pictures. I was knitting happily by the time I realized that The Harlot's (wonderful) talk was nearly finished. I figured that she might not appreciate me snapping (possibly) distracting pictures at that point, so I refrained. I'm hoping that this will merely be the first of times that our paths will cross, so no worries. I may very well get to Kinnear her yet.All in all, it was an utterly wonderful and totally surreal day. Here's hoping for more like it.

I released the Gnome Mittens last night!As is (mostly) usual, the pattern also includes instructions to make Gnome Fingerless Mittens as well. There are full-colour charts, large pictures and detailed instructions, all wrapped up in a nice 5-page .pdf (also as usual.) Grab your copy here, on Ravelry. Give it a day or two to appear in my Etsy shop.